Another 2 years have come and gone and Ubuntu 24.04 has now been the new Long Term Support (LTS) version for half a year. To plan my eventual migration on my notebook, I’ve been installing 24.04 in a VM running on two different Ubuntu 22.04 hosts. It’s good to see that it works, but the default installation settings end up in a frozen screen and some manual tweaking is required.
Fortunately, I already had some experience with such behavior from previous Ubuntu versions and here are the steps to fix this:
1) Already before the installer runs, set the graphics adapter to ‘VBoxSVGA‘. At least on my hosts with Ubuntu 22.04 and Virtualbox 7.0.18 and 7.0.20 respectively, that’s the graphics adapter that doesn’t result in a frozen screen after some time.
2) Switch from Wayland to X in the logon screen once the installation is finished. When selecting an account to login during the first startup after installation, click on the cogwheel at the bottom right of the screen.
3) For good measure, also use X instead of Wayland for the login screen once the installer has run. Have a look at end of this post for how to change the configuration for that.
4) In case you have an Nvidia graphics card on the host and some apps in the client VM are slow to start on the Ubuntu 24.04 after booting, remove the following package in the client VM:
sudo apt remove xdg-desktop-portal-gnomeFor details look here. I’m not sure why the host graphics card has an impact in the client, as it really shouldn’t have, but this fixed the problem for me. Also strange that this only seems to appear with an Nvidia graphics card on the host. On my notebook with an Intel CPU/GPU I didn’t have to remove the package.
From where I stand, it seems Virtualbox/Oracle has dropped the ball a bit on Ubuntu desktop installations. All of this should not really be necessary.